Andy Richter wants justice.
The Dancing With the Stars quarterfinalist spent an impressive nine weeks in the competition on the recently wrapped 34th season. That means he got to know and appreciate his fellow competitors quite well. Though he has nothing but praise for the top five who proceeded into Tuesday’s finale — wildlife conservationist and eventual winner Robert Irwin, Olympian Jordan Chiles, influencer Alix Earle, content creator Dylan Efron, and actress Elaine Hendrix — he thinks one finalist in particular has been deprived of the acclaim she deserves.
“Jordan is fantastic,” he tells Entertainment Weekly in an interview conducted a week after his elimination. “I will say Jordan, I think she’s been, as a pattern, perhaps a little bit underscored. I don’t think that she was given the appreciation that she deserves.”
Disney/Eric McCandless
Jordan Chiles and Ezra Sosa on ‘Dancing With the Stars’ season 34
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Chiles, already an Olympic gold medalist at only 24 years old, entered the competition with the weight of expectation on her shoulders. The series has hosted nearly two dozen Olympians over the course of its two decades on the air. Like Chiles, many of them have gone on to place in the finals, and six have taken home the Mirrorball trophy.
The gymnast consistently won high marks for her dances with pro partner Ezra Sosa, and garnered enough fan support to float her into the finale. But Richter echoed the comments of some fans online, who felt that Chiles’ style and execution were taken for granted or undervalued when compared to her competitors.
A difference in opinion over her Wicked Night routine even divided the judges, with Carrie Ann Inaba calling her Rumba “perfection,” and then playfully mocking Derek Hough when he noted, “You have all the motion, you have all the moves, now I want to see the emotion.”
Chiles ended up placing third in the finale, with Earle ahead of her, Irwin at the top, Efron below her, and Hendrix at the bottom.
Richter rides hard for Chiles, but he did call Irwin for the win well ahead of his crowning moment.
“If you’re asking me as an oddsmaker, it would be Robert, because Robert is just sunshine,” he says. “Everybody’s fantastic, everybody is [an] amazing dancer, but there’s something special about him and his energy. There were times I’d be like, ‘Is he really that positive?’ And you know, yes, he is just enthusiasm on two legs.”
Chiles also had her own time to shine during the finale, performing a dizzyingly fast freestyle that Inaba praised as “the best freestyle I’ve seen in 20 seasons, hands down,” adding, “You are a powerful woman of color and came here to represent, and you show them how it’s done.”
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